Open data will help spur economic development: Clement

The federal government is opening access to more government data and allowing entrepreneurs to license its use in the hopes it will spur them to come up with profit-making ventures, Treasury Board President Tony Clement said Tuesday.

In an announcement and then in a Google Hangout, Clement said the era of governments “hoarding” data has come to an end. Unless there are concerns over issues of national security or privacy, Clement said the government’s default position will now be that data should be open and made available to Canadians in a user-friendly format.

“Open data is Canada’s new natural resource,” Clement said in a statement. “The possibilities for using this data are as infinite as our imaginations. I look forward to seeing what innovative and entrepreneurial Canadians are able to create with this newly accessible information.”

Clement said he is planning an app-athon in the fall that will encourage developers to come up with new and interesting applications for the data that is being made available.

At the same time, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced that sought-after data on questions such as application inventories and processing wait times will now be made available.

In the past, a small number of immigration lawyers have accessed that data through the Access to Information Act, then sold the information to subscribers, he said.

“Now, we post all of that online,” said Kenney. “It’s free, automatically available. I’m sorry to those lawyers, we’ve cut some of their revenue stream, but all that information is free now.”

The announcements came as G8 leaders meeting in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland endorsed an Open Data Charter that outlines a common set of norms and standards to make data more open and accessible.

Robert Herjavec, an entrepreneur who appears on the CBC show Dragon’s Den, said the access to government data will help level the playing field for small businesses that don’t have the same budgets for data as big corporations.